How Amazon's Kindle Made It OK For Women To Read Porn On The Subway

Note: Entertainment reporter Kirsten Acuna (above) does not read "50 Shades of Grey" on the NYC subway. She did however read it on NJTransit. Kirsten Acuna / Michael Izzo, Business Insider The New York subway system is often referred to as a traveling reading room due to the number of people who pack a book or a magazine for their commute to work. For a certain type of New Yorker, displaying a highbrow book cover to your fellow passengers—Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Love in the Time of Cholera" is typical—is a way to demonstrate your sophistication and taste.

And then Amazon's Kindle arrived (along with the iPad and the Nook), freeing people to read what they actually want to read without worrying about the status signals it sent.

Which is why, in virtually every subway car running under Manhattan right now, there's a woman furtively reading "50 Shades of Grey" on a Kindle. She usually seems to think that no one else knows she's paging through the torrid S&M romance between Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, by E.L. James.

But the subway is crowded, and you don't have to get too close to another passenger to catch the tell-tale glimpses of text ("she clutched the sides of the sink" ... "he was naked, gloriously naked," etc.).

As a regular subway rider, I'd only ever previously seen one woman openly reading erotic lit on the subway before: Anais Nin's "Delta of Venus," which at least comes with a literary pedigree. It was years ago, but I admired her boldness (it features incest and prostitution).

50SOG has become such a media phenom that I've even seen women—and it's always women—unabashedly reading it in paperback in Starbucks, showing off its distinctive black and white cover.

It's the fact that it's a media phenom that makes this OK, of course. (And if everyone knows that everyone else is reading it on a Kindle, does it really make a difference if you read the paperback?) Still, you won't see people, or men, cracking open "The Story of O" or "Penthouse Forum" in public anytime soon. With 50SOG, you can still claim you're reading it for ironic hipster reasons.

The result: If you've noticed that the women in your office arrive at work raring to go, just remember that if they're carrying a Kindle it might not be the work that's got them all revved up.